'Lift' review: Kevin Hart comedic heist thriller disappoints

WHAT IT'S ABOUT The comedic heist thriller “Lift” stars Kevin Hart as Cyrus, the leader of a team of art thieves. They've been coerced by Interpol to switch sides, utilizing their skills to stop a financial transaction between your everyday megalomaniacal movie billionaire and a group of terrorists.

The director, F. Gary Gray, knows his way around an action picture, with a resume that includes everything from “The Negotiator” to “The Fate of the Furious” and “The Italian Job” remake.

The co-stars include Gugu Mbatha-Raw as the Interpol agent Abby, Vincent D'Onofrio and Billy Magnussen. Jean Reno takes his turn as the snarling villain Jorgensen.

The plot revolves around the team attempting a midair heist of $500 million in gold bars that Jorgensen's importing to his villa in Tuscany so that he can pay off cyberterrorists to cause flooding catastrophes that allow him to manipulate the stock market. You know, the usual everyday thing.

MY SAY This is the kind of movie where a character can scream “Get me NATO” with a straight face. And then a second character in a different location right afterward can also demand that a subordinate “Get me NATO.”

That's not exactly the peak of comedy in this general area. It's a long way, for example, from Lloyd Bridges proclaiming that he'd picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue in “Airplane!” 

But it does suggest an understanding on the part of “Lift's” makers that none of this plot makes the slightest bit of sense, and nothing on screen has even the most passing connection to reality.

Since it, therefore, cannot be taken seriously, there are only two ways to pull off a movie like this.

Go as big and over-the-top as a “Fast and the Furious” entry, overwhelming the audience to such an extent that there's no time to even access the logical part of your brain. 

Or, you can wink at the audience by doubling down on the comedy, whether it's through one-liners, moments of inspired weirdness or just by letting Hart do his thing.

“Lift” doesn't go far enough in either direction.

The assembling of the team, plotting of the heist and its eventual carrying-out can be fun to watch in the sense that one might enjoy eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for the one millionth time. But it's utterly indistinct.

The characters with the exception of D'Onofrio's, given that he always brings a degree of idiosyncrasy to his parts, play as one-dimensional archetypes. They have barely a sliver of backstory. The action scenes seem to have been rushed, going through the expected paces, without much in the way of inspiration.

And the comedy, as you can see from the example earlier in this review, leaves a lot to be desired. It mostly exists around the edges, when a scene needs a touch of something extra.

What's left, at the end of the day, is relentlessly milquetoast, a movie of half measures.

BOTTOM LINE It's another disappointing action movie from Netflix, which has a very spotty record in this space.